The Atom Station

by Halldor Laxness

  The other possessions of the church were a three-pronged and thrice-broken brass candlestick, which I tied up with twine for them so that it would hang together so long as no one touched it; and a copper candle-snuffer. With this luggage we were going to start so-called spiritual life anew here in the valleys of the north.

  The pastor wanted to baptize little Gudrun at the same time as the church was being consecrated; but when I told him that I had become scared of sorcery and exorcisms, and asked him if he did not feel it a grave responsibility to dedicate an innocent child to an institution that had been the arch enemy of human nature for two thousand years and self-confessed opponent of Creation, and asked if it would not be more prudent to keep the distance between gods and men as great as possible, he merely smiled and patted me on the cheek and then whispered to me in confidence: “Pay no attention to what I may recite from the manual with my lips; in our minds we shall dedicate her to the Slope of Life.”

  The Women’s Institute brought a Danish butter-god rising from a cream trough, but when the time came there was no place to hang it in the church and so they took the plaque away again. But they brought other things with them which were much more useful for the dedication of a church, no more nor less than a complete refreshment tent and all that went with it—coffee and chicory, and biscuits in the enormous quantities you can only see in the country, made from flout; margarine, granulated sugar, and essence, in addition to layer-cake by the chestful. And though such baking might have had a touch of anemia, it played its part in saving the day’s morale, for outside there was rain and a great deal of Black Death. And no one could expect dalesmen to provide coffee and what goes with it for many districts, even though they happen to have knocked up a hut for God.

  The pastor and the bishop made their two speeches apiece, and those who were sober crossed and uncrossed their legs and wriggled their toes and counted up to a thousand and from a thousand back down to one, over and over again all day long, until the speeches came to an end and the church was consecrated. Thereafter the pastor dedicated little Gudrun to the Slope of Life, according to our agreement. At the end of the service the cement-smeared plank benches in the church were moved out into the tent, and later used for firewood. And after that the church stood empty, filled only with a smell of cement, with damp walls and the saints and the Latin painted over. When the temporary door had been put back in place (it had been made out of packing cases to last the next hundred years), it came to light that on the door were the following words, upside down, in black printed letters: Sunna Margarine Company. Finally a bar was nailed across the church door on the outside, for the State grant had not sufficed to provide a lock. Somehow it was as if everyone had a feeling that God would not be worshipped in this place again in the near future.

  THE NORTHERN TRADING COMPANY

  It rained very hard that evening. Near midnight we were relieved of the last drenched dedication guests, some of them being taken away by their friends, slung across their saddle bows. It had now been dark for some time. I was at the farm door with a candle, hanging up some rags to dry; the rain drummed on the slabbed paving, and through the open door came the warm fermented smell of the hay, inseparable from the first shortened evenings. I had been hearing the dog barking busily for some time, but thought it was just the revellers being carried homewards down the valley; until all at once a man was standing in the doorway. First I heard his footsteps outside on the paving, then I felt him come nearer and gradually fill the doorway until all of him was there.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  I thought I was going to turn to stone where I stood, but then replied questioningly and angrily in the way one would address a burglar: “Good evening?”

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “And so what?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What a fright you gave me, man.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s past midnight.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I didn’t want to come during the daytime. I knew there were crowds of people here. But I wanted to see my daughter.”

  “Come right in out of the doorway, man,” I said, and offered him my hand.

  He made no attempt to kiss me or anything like that; caressing or coaxing was not in his nature. It was impossible to have anything but confidence in a man of his demeanor.

  “Take off your things,” I said, “you’re soaking wet. How did you come?”

  “The Cadillac’s at the other side of the gully,” he said.

  “The Cadillac!” I said. “Are you a thief now too?”

  “The vocation,” he said.

  I told him he ought to explain this vocation, but he said it was impossible to explain a vocation.

  “Have you left the police?” I asked; and he replied, “A long time ago.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  “Plenty of money,” he said.

  “Plenty,” I echoed. “If there is plenty, then it has quite certainly not been well come by. But come into the parlor anyway, or come into the kitchen instead, perhaps, we’ll see if there’s any life left in the range. If not I’ll try to get a fire going; you’ll have to have some coffee even though I’m not sure if you’ll be allowed to stay the night.”

  The kitchen was directly opposite the main door, with the parlor to the left and the living room to the right, where my parents slept.

  “Where’s my daugher?” he asked.

  The outcome was that I took him into the parlor and shone the candle on the girl sleeping beside the wall, in the spare bed, with my place just in front of her. He looked at her, and I at this unknown man, and found myself still in sympathy with those races that recognize no connection between father and child. For the moment I could in no way see nor understand that he could own this child any more than other men did, nor indeed that any man owns children generally. He stared at her for a long time without saying a word. I lifted up the bedclothes so that he could see all of her.

  “Can you feel what a nice smell she has?” I asked.

  “Smell?” he said.

  “I thought they smelled of urine,” he said.

  “That’s because you’re a pig,” I said.

  He looked at me and asked solemnly, “Am I not her father?”

  “Unless you want to deny it on oath,” I said, and added: “Thought I don’t really see how it matters.”

  “It doesn’t matter?”

  “We won’t go into that now,” I said. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll try to cheer the fire up a bit.”

  When he had sat down I noticed that his clothes were made of expensive material and his hat was new; and that his footwear was ill-suited for walking: his thin brown shoes had got covered in mud on the way over from the car, and he had waded through the stream. But when I offered him dry things he flatly refused them. “Not even well-knitted homespun socks?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  As usual, he had to be fed with conversational topics, he was reluctant to speak without prompting; but long after he had fallen silent the timbre of his voice would still tingle in one’s ears.

  “What news is there from the south?” I asked.

  “None,” he said.

  “How is … our … organist?” I asked, and at the same moment was aware of the surrender implied in admitting our joint ownership of anything. And he was not slow to notice it either.

  “Our organist,” he repeated. “His mother is dead. But he is raising seven new kinds of roses.”

  I remarked how good it was to forget first and then die later, like that woman; and then I said that the world could not be utterly wicked, fundamentally, when there were so many varieties of roses in existence.

  “And here’s some layer cake,” I added. “We inherited it from the Women’s Institute. Or would you rather have bread and butter with your coffee?”

  Naturally he preferred bread and butter.

  I cou
ld feel how he was watching me, even though I had my back turned to him as I busied myself with the food and coffee.

  “And the gods?” I said, still searching in the corner cupboard.

  “They have declared war on Pliers,” said my visitor. “They claim that he had given them a half share in the Cadillac while he still believed in them, and allege that they have it in writing. So Pliers got rid of the car cheap.”

  “And you think it charitable to take the car off the poor creatures?” I said. “It was their pride and joy, after all, and I say for myself that I find it hard to imagine an atom poet without a Cadillac.”

  “I don’t pity the gods,” he said. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  “And how is the Figures-Faking-Federation getting on at selling the country?” I asked.

  “Very well,” he replied. “Pliers has flown to Denmark to buy the bones. The F.F.F. is going to hold a monstrous tile-hat funeral—for the people.”

  We carried on talking about this and that for a while, until suddenly, while I was laying the table, he said, staring at my hands, “May I be with you tonight?”

  “Leave me alone, I’m a reinstated virgin,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It’s a girl who becomes a virgin again after seven years if she is left alone,” I said, and hurried to the corner cupboard again so as not to let him see how I was blushing; it is really an act of sex to talk like that.

  “We’ll get married this autumn,” he said.

  “Are you mad, man? How can you get such nonsense into your head?”

  He said: “It is expedient for us both; all of us; everyone.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better for me to try to become a person first?” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Can’t you understand that I’m nothing, man?” I said. “I know nothing, can do nothing, am nothing.”

  “You are the ultimate thing in a northern valley,” he said.

  “I think it enough to have a baby with the first one who offered, without making things worse by marrying him.”

  “Why did you slam the door on me last year?” he asked.

  “Why do you think?”

  “Another man, maybe,” he said. “And myself fallen out of favor.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Always another and another, a new one and another new one. I could scarcely cope with the numbers I slept with.”

  “Why are you behaving like this?” he said.

  “Tell me more of the south,” I said. “Tell me at least what you have become. I don’t even know whom I’m talking to.”

  “Tell me what you want to become,” he said.

  “I want to learn children’s nursing,” I said, and thereby made him the first to hear what I had long been thinking to myself.

  “Nursing other people’s children?” he asked.

  “All children belong to society,” I said. “But obviously society will have to be changed in order to make it treat its children better.”

  “Change society!” he said contemptuously. “I’ve become tired of such talk.”

  “You’ve also become a criminal, just as I thought.”

  He said, “When I was at home, as a boy, I discovered Communism on my own, without reading about it in books. Perhaps all poor boys in the country and towns do it, if they are right in the head and are fond of music. Then I went to school and forgot Communism. Finally I got my vocation and unhitched the hack, as I told you last year. Now comes the test of whether I am a man in the society in which I live.”

  “We live in a criminal society, and everyone knows it; those who gain by it know it, just as well as those who lose by it,” I said.

  “I don’t care in the least,” he said. “I only live once. I shall show them that an educated person who is fond of music does not need to become their lackey if he himself doesn’t want to.” I contemplated him for a long time across the table as he ate and drank.

  “Who are you?” I asked finally.

  “The Cadillac’s at the other side of the gully,” he said. “If you want to, drive away with me tonight.”

  “I could best believe that you are the Deacon of Myrkriver,”* I said.

  He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a bulging wallet, opened it beside his coffee-cup, and pulled out half of its contents, bunches of hundred-kronur bills and five-hundred-kronur bills like new packs of playing cards, fresh from a bank: “The Northern Trading Company,” he said. “Cars, bulldozers, tractors, mixing machines, vacuum cleaners, floor-polishers: everything that whirls, everything that makes a noise; modern times. I’m on my way south from my first trading trip.”

  I reached out my hand for the notes and said, “I’ll burn them for you, my lad.”

  He pushed them back into his wallet and returned it to his pocket.

  “I’m not above men, as the gods are, much less above gods, as the organist is,” he said. “I am a man, money is the only reality. The reason I show you my wallet is so that you should not think me mad.”

  “Anyone who thinks that money is reality is mad,” I said. “That’s why the organist burned the money and then borrowed a krona off me for boiled sweets. And now I shall let you into a secret in return: there is another man who affects me even more powerfully than you, I have only to know of him a hundred kilometers away for my knees to go weak. But do you know what makes me afraid of him? He has a thousand times more money than you; and he has offered to buy me anything in the world that money can buy. But I have no wish to become a million-kronur lie in female form. I am what I can be on my own earnings. I would perhaps have invited you to stay the night if you had come here penniless, yes, perhaps even have gone away with you tomorrow morning, on foot. But now I cannot invite you to stay the night; nor drive away with you, either.”

  * Folk-tale: a deacon from Myrkriver was drowned when riding to fetch his sweetheart to a Christmas party. His ghost arrived to pick up the young woman, and tried to take her with him into his grave. She escaped with difficulty, “and was never the same again afterwards.”

  22. Spiritual visitors

  One autumn night I woke up in the greyness that precedes dawn; and to the best of my knowledge it was our pastor outside on the paving talking to my father through the living room window. Soon I heard the footsteps of visitors at the farm door. I dressed in a flash and put the child away, but while I was tidying up the spare room, where my daughter and I stayed, the visitors came in.

  It seemed at first glance an ominous sight to see a pastor, sober, and without warning, in a remote parish-of-ease at that time of day, but the balance was restored by the fact that on this occasion he had picked himself companions who well became a true pastor on an unexpected journey—the gods themselves. I am not going to describe the shock it gave me to see the two so-and-so’s, those phenomena who had done most to turn the tarmac into folk tale in my memories, crossing a threshold north of the mountains in the flesh. But this was clearly not the time and place to indulge in stupid witticisms: the Joint-Stock Company Earnest was deeply imprinted on the expressions of the visitors—I am tempted to say, the Murder Corporation Solemnity; the atom poet Benjamin strode through the mountains with his face to the skies, and in Brilliantine’s eyes there lurked that unique shallow stab of insanity which is practically made for bewitching a pastor, yes, even for beguiling a girl in a garden behind a house.

  “Where are the twins?” I asked.

  “I promised the wife to shoot them a lamb,” said Brilliantine, and bared those smooth glistening front teeth.

  “Fancy you up here in the country,” I said to the atom poet, who had flopped exhausted on to our divan.

  “The whole world—one station,” he replied. “And I Benjamin, this little brother.”

  “They do not come empty-handed,” said the pastor.

  “We were sent,” they said.

  I asked by whom, but the pastor was quicker and said, “They have a mi
ssion.”

  “We were sent by the godhead,” they said.

  “Which godhead?” I asked.

  “These young men are instruments,” said the pastor. “Remarkable instruments. Hmm. In response to inspiration they have brought with them here to the north the earthly remains of the Darling. They have received a command of a kind I do not care to call into question. And at the same time, our dear district’s age-old dream seems about to be fulfilled.”

  “Well, well, is that so?” said my father, and looked at the visitors with a benevolent smile. “And who are your people, boys?”

  “We belong to the atom bomb,” they said.

  At this reply my father’s face stiffened and his smile vanished as if he had heard something flippant and cheap.

  The pastor said that the boys were rather sleepy.

  “One is a poet and singer and former message boy with the joint stock company Snorredda,” I said, “and the other is a model family man and owner of twins, former storekeeper with the same enterprise: both friends of mine from the south.”

  “Great believers, and they have had a remarkable experience,” said the pastor. “I do not call anything of that kind into question.”

  “We don’t believe,” corrected the god Brilliantine. “We are. We have direct contact. We could, moreover, have become millionaires long ago if we had so wished; perhaps got to Hollywood, what’s more.”

  “We are at war,” said Benjamin. “He who does not believe in us shall first be crushed, then wiped out. We shall not cease before we have stolen everything and broken everything. Then we shall burn everything. Down with Two Hundred Thousand Pliers! We shall not even spare Portuguese Sardines nor Danish Dirt. Am I mad or am I not mad?”

  My father had gone out. The pastor nodded to himself over these remarkable instruments of the Almighty, and offered them a pinch of snuff, but they only wanted to puff their own cigarettes; on the other hand, the pastor was allowed to light them for them.

  “This silence will drive me mad,” said Benjamin.